Humankind, as TS Eliot pointed out, cannot bear too much reality. As election exhaustion sets in, and months of grim announcements about cuts, taxes and currencies loom ahead, most of the country is going to do its best to escape all that, one way or another. For the boys, it's the World Cup and some cool new apps for that freshly unboxed iPad. For us women, it's more likely something different.

One can never know for sure, of course, but I have a niggling suspicion that Eliot, had he been still with us, would not have been a Sex and the City chap. There would not have been, alongside his well-thumbed collections of Donne's sermons and Pound's cantos, the piled DVD box sets of the girls' years of adventure and friendship.

This is not mainly because Eliot was a raving intellectual, but because he was a chap. Few things divide the sexes more than the long-running series derided by Philip French yesterday as "a non-satirical sitcom celebrating consumerism at its most unendearingly extravagant". Peter Bradshaw called it "dull, misjudged and quite incredibly boring", while Mark Kermode, in a TV review, could barely find words bad enough to describe it. He did though, admit that it will be a box-office hit.

Quite a lot of men enjoy Jane Austen and the far better-written Desperate Housewives – better written than Sex and the City, I hasten to add, not better written than Jane Austen. There are even men who hum along to girl bands, or who enjoyed Legally Blonde in London's West End. But it's hard to find one who reacts with anything other than disgust when faced with the hard-shopping foursome sipping their Cosmopolitans.

I am not a fanatical fashionista. The nearest I get to wearing labels is forgetting to snip the tab off my Marks & Spencer trousers. I'm so sad that I've always thought of a handbag mainly as something to put things in. But, hey, we all like a bit of escapism sometimes.

My contention is that there is nothing more intrinsically objectionable in women fantasising about big shopping and the ups and downs of urban sexuality than men fantasising about war, gangs or fast cars. There is a reason why the TV series – admittedly, much better than the films – continued to wow audiences for a dozen years. Based on newspaper columns originally, it began transmitting in 1998 and, if you included the films, outlasted New Labour.

Is it a mirror of good progressive values? Certainly not. It is indeed a label-fetishising, good-time-gal carry on; but it is also a paean to sisterly friendships, strong women and a constant girl-conversation about everything from sexual diseases to the burqa, flat-hunting to bad, if alluring, men. It's a bigger, brighter-coloured, more shouty take on what millions of western women think and talk about all the time, and did throughout the long boom.

What really irritates me is the effortless assumption of male superiority that suggests male fantasy lives are more serious and real than female ones. Yes, the SATC foursome don't seem to have to work very hard, and yet seem to have a lot of money to splash around. True, the latest caper in Abu Dhabi is not the finest hour of this long running tale, but guess what? In action and horror movies, there are plenty of duff storylines, unreal heroes and unsavoury goings-on.

Yes, it's true, Sex and the City celebrates a shallow consumerism that it is the purpose of serious journalism, and indeed serious living, to challenge. But it's the same shallow consumerism that, for instance, allows all those techie boys to jump around waving their Ipads outside the Apple store. The working conditions of the Chinese producing Ipads are horrible. These are machines designed to do "cool stuff". They are more complicated than the products of Jimmy Choo or Versace; but they are no more serious, or deserving of inherent respect.

Most thinking people live in an uneasy and incoherent negotiation between how they think the world ought to be, and relaxing into the occasional wallow in how it really is. There are fiercely moral souls who don't fly, or go on holiday, or buy flashy new gadgets, or eat anything except locally grown vegetables and the odd handful of seeds.

Most of us, however, are hypocrites who enjoy some of the superabundance and glistening choices of modern times, while at the same time worrying about it, and wanting limits to be set. It's not impossible to be in favour of more progressive taxation and decent welfare provision while at the same time admiring a well-cut jacket or leafing through the holiday supplements hoping for a good deal on a beach break.

Women and men are not so different in all that. There are undoubtedly plenty of women who enjoy football or going down the pub, while some men may take pleasure in shopping for clothes or spend time on their appearance. But there still seems to be a glaring inequality between the assumption that male fantasy life is serious, even admirable, while the female version is trashy and silly.

It's all trashy and silly. There is nothing inherently noble or serious-minded about men screaming for one patch of the earth's surface against another patch, as they follow 11 people in shirts and shorts booting a ball. Watching Tarantino films about Americans scalping Nazis, or gladiators capering about in a mock-up of ancient Rome isn't "higher" than watching women engage in competitive shopping 'n' bitching. Indeed, it's further away from everyday realities, not closer to them.

It's all trashy and silly – and that's the point. Fantasy allows us a brief holiday in our more childish, amoral, uncontemplating selves. Unless we are spectacularly dim, it's a holiday after which we can return to our everyday selves, not corrupted, but refreshed and amused. To dream of a fluffier, easier, brighter-coloured world means you precisely don't interrogate its political contradictions. You can't have escapism about tax credits or fantasise about the breakup of retail and speculative banking. If you can, you're a very weird piece of fruit indeed.

In short, the critics of Sex and the City need to lighten up – and remember that everyone has a different fantasy world. Philip French says, rather memorably, of the new film: "Most reasonable people would probably prefer to be stoned to death in Riyadh than see this film a second time." I know plenty who not only disagree, but will probably watch a third and fourth time when it comes out on DVD. And you know what? Though once is enough for me, I promise not to find that any more offensive than those flag-decorated pubs full of World Cup sillies.